Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
The losers are the ones who watch their shitty videos all day instead of having a life
Loser influencer, influencer of losers, is how I read it.
How would you like to lose your money today? Buy my shitcoin! Too new for you? How about an old-fashioned pump-and-dump! Got no money left? Buy this overpriced energy drink it won't help you to get a job! .. No money at all?? Ok just watch some more ads then
IR remotes with their simple, one-way, unencrypted, somewhat interoperable protocol are so last-century.
Besides, if you were going to say something that you didn't want the CCP knowing about, you could (for now..) unplug your telescreen and stay away from smartphones. But if even the TV remote is taking note of what you say so it can dob you in via your neighbour's TV (or yours when you next switch it on) then we might all just give up and accept surveillance by a foreign state.
As the Private Eye put it in their spoof cabinet WhatsApp group: Be careful of what you say in front of the lightbulbs
And I am sure that the remotes will be accepting signed firmware updates via Bluetooth and er, StarFlash, from the TV, entirely for the benefit of the people of course and nothing at all to do with updating the list of woke words, sentiment analysis or anything like that!
On a possibly related note, i took apart a discarded "IVG Air" vape, and discovered what looks like a digital microphone in a 6-pin metal package (apparently used as a puff sensor, but seems a bit overkill for that purpose), QFN32 microcontroller (could be esp32, can't tell due to no part number), large anonymous SOIC8 (flash? SPI-RAM?) and a large F-shaped trace that looked suspiciously like a PCB antenna, plus the usual charge control IC and transistors. All seemed a bit more than i'd expect for a disposable vape. Maybe it doubles up as a voice control for my TV?
No shit.
However, what worries me is that AI is poisoning all of its 'deterministic/reliable/accurate' competitors, especially in areas like Internet Search.
Google and Bing are (deliberately??) Shit, to try to force people into using ChatGPT/Gemimi instead. Search indexing itself has become an impossible task due to an endless stream of machine-generated slop.
Jobs and techniques are being replaced by AI not because it does a good job, but it does a shit job fast, and you can re-roll the RNG until it gives you the bullshit answer you were looking for
> They don't have a database of all GPT outputs.
Do you know that for a fact, or is this more of a "surely OpenAI would never do such a thing.."?
They wouldn't need to store everything, forever - just a few weeks worth. And even then, they may be able to filter the interesting stuff.
Besides, seeing what sort of queries it gets asked (and by whom) and which outputs subsequently appear on the Internet is a valuable source of training data, and the size of it is miniscule compared to the original training data. There is no way they would NOT do that, and unless you know for a fact that they don't, it would be very silly of you to trust them not to.
> but there are still laws that would affect them if they did that.
Er, more like laws affecting them if they -didn't-. In the UK at least, they would be expected to keep records of activity - if someone did something naughty with ChatGPT, or if someone complained about its output, the authorities would want a log of recent activity.
Also, I note that GitHub, since their owners also basically own ChatGPT, have access to ChatGPT's database of outputs.
If the fake bugreports were being generated by ChatGPT, then GitHub could say "This bugreport looks very similar to a recent ChatGPT output. Do this again and be banned" - but they don't do that. Why not?
GitHub: Social Coding
Sounds a lot like Social Media to me. No wonder it is full of crap like this.
LinkedIn is just the same.
Incidentally, both platforms are owned by the one entity that might have a vested interest in destroying Open Source. It's the final step of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
Incidentally, there is an archive copy of a deleted Wikipedia page which claims that an Antpower is approximately equal to 15 microwatts
Apparently it is also possible to harvest several antpower out of the modern RF-noisy environment, using little more than an antenna and a Germanium diode..
The question is I suppose, would a robo-ant prefer to carry a leaf-sized dipole antenna or a diamond-encased radioactive source? Probably, the former. Unless it was hunting down a queen ant from the past which was to give birth to its future nemesis, in which case it might need a self-contained, hardened power source.
I think the basic problem here is that the Reg Standards Bureau does not cover Power or Energy well..
The closest I can find in terms of derived units would be 0.2715 Norris-Linguine per Truss?
Certainly a contributing factor. But who would suggest they could have picked instead to magically solve all of their ill-defined problems? Fujitsu? IBM? Microsoft? U4BW?
No, as much as I despise Oracle and all of the above alternative bloodsuckers, the problem was to jump into a migration without first completely understanding its organisational implications and technical requirements.
Probably, some overzealous salesperson from the systems integrator and a clueless council director are jointly to blame here
I don't think this is going to make a dent in corporate adoption of Linux, sadly.
Corporate IT bods don't really give a toss what it looks like, (except to the extent that users know where everything is and won't keep calling the Helldesk because they can't find MS Paint - and this distro is not similar enough i.e. identical to Windows for those sorts of users to be happy with it) - What the Corporate IT dept really cares about is Active Directory, Group Policy, how to remotely control what the lusers are allowed to do, and I doubt that this has any more than RHEL does for that.
So no, there is no use case. This is an 'Uncanny Valley' flop which will be universally hated from all directions.
This seems to be designed to extract money from people daft enough to give it a try, while giving nothing to the projects that did all the hard work i.e. KDE, Ubuntu, Linux (and Microsoft, lol). May the lawsuits surge forth.
That may be deliberate, i.e. 'dithering' to prevent hairs from sytematically blocking the gel spray. If they wobble both the spray and the patient a bit, then it doesn't matter if the hair blocks some spray particles.
> this technique won’t work well – or perhaps at all – on longer-haired individuals. Lu told the University of Texas that fixing that is next on the team's to-do list, and that robotic fingers or combs could be incorporated into the printer to separate hair in target areas.
I would have thought that a compressed air jet would do better for separating hair around a point, but what do I know i'm just a commentard.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a "forced update".. Most people just accept forced updates these days, but I find them obnoxious, just begging for a supply-chain attack especially if you let them install automatically. As I type this, I notice WhatsApp is threatening to stop working in 5 days.. Only a month since its last forced update.
Of course, I know that WhatsApp is swiss cheese and that doesn't stop me using it, because I am not "up to no good". Not that I trust the authorities to act with integrity and uncorrupted justice, but because I don't want to draw their attention to myself - I don't want to be the honest man in Cardinal Richlieu's infamous quote.
So I would avoid anything that is supposed to be "secure" and yet still behaves like WhatsApp (i.e. with closed source, dubious permissions, and forced updates), because otherwise i'm telling someone somewhere that I might be "up to no good" / their enemy, while handing them everything I type.
But should I feel the need to use anything "secure" then it damn well better be properly secure (i.e. i'll compile it myself from source, thanks, along with any unusual dependencies that it pulls in), and deniable, because just using it is going to attract attention from all sorts of agencies.
Gone are the days where everyone uses properly secure communications by default, because they have banned it, and backdoored anything that was secure but got too popular.
Nobody wants them! That is the state of the Cybersecurity job market. Because everyone knows that the attack surface is near-infinite and a comprehensive defence is near-impossible, and management will resist any attempt at you doing your job, because it mildly inconveniences theirs. Until it all goes wrong of course, in which case they have You to take all the blame.
The job adverts might as well read:
* for disaster
> very little gaming support unless you are willing to fiddle and tweak and sacrifice your firstborn to the Great God Linus. Yes, despite YEARS of faffing about and hundreds of variants Linux is still a PITA to setup if you want to play games and I just can't be arsed
Er, what?
apt install steam (*)
steam -> Settings -> "Enable SteamPlay for all titles"
...
That's it.
* obviously ensure that non-free sources are enabled, and you also may need to enable i386 packages, turning them on is simple: dpkg --add-architecture i386; apt update
Even VR works out of the box. Yes, even with Windows VR games
It's also possible that they were planting remote or timed detonation charges.. Very difficult to go and inspect all of the cable to look for anything dodgy.. It will naturally include lumps and bumps such as joint boxes, and a timed shaped charge explosive could be as small as a limpet
One theory is that a sub with a ROV was tailing the freighter, to mask its sonar signature. Such an ROV might have had time to plant something.
We wouldn't know until er.. see icon
TBH just sitting here speculating and getting worried about it is exactly what Putin & chums want us to do. A better idea would be to assume they WILL try something, and build resilience into our infrastructure.
A full scale test of the Black Start procedure would be a good idea IMO (I am skeptical as to whether the grid can be restarted with the proportion of renewables that the government wants us to have...). As would be a few SAM sites along the coast and maybe a Trident missile test. Putin is rattling his sabre so we need to make sure that ours still works.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
It's a public fear tactic, I believe. Not a serious threat.. yet. It's like the Russian "Research Vessel" Yantar which a few days earlier turned on its AIS in the Irish Sea and caused a minor panic.
It doesn't matter that it took a few days (at great expense, i'm sure) to repair it, the point is it made people afraid of what they could/might do.
e.g. it's much more difficult to repair an underwater high voltage power cable. Or indeed a gas pipeline
> does anyone know of a superior site with instructions of how to tame win11 telemetry and successfully remove all the crap and bloat that comes with a new windows device?
Err...
You know what we're going to say to that. See icon.
Install a Linux distro (personally I love Debian, but Ubuntu and Arch are great for new users) and then install Steam. Then go to Settings -> Compatibility -> Enable SteamPlay for all titles.
All your old school (and new school) games are available there.
Just been happily playing the latest Stalker 2 on proton. Almost everything works flawlessly out of the box now. Windows is obsolete, there is no longer any reason to use it.
In the very, very rare case where I have found a Windows game on Steam that doesn't play on Linux in Proton, Steam have refunded it for me.
> > although i'm not sure what three Web browsers he is on about
> So you didn't try it, then?
I tried it - on MY systems, which are KDE-full (debian) but not "KDE-OS"
Falkon: Never heard of it and don't have it on my (debian) desktop. I guess it's part of the KDE OS that you are talking about (which I have not tried, I have no need to) but is obviously NOT part of KDE - it's just a "lightweight web browser written in Qt" according to Apt, and it has no dependencies from or to KDE.
Angelfish: Ok, it's a KDE app by the looks of it, but again it is not installed on my system (even though I have kde-full) so it's not part of the desktop environment, it's an "app" for it, maintained by KDE. I don't have to have it, because I use Debian, and not some read-only blob for my /usr
Konqueror is indeed part of KDE and used to be its default file browser before Dolphin appeared.. It has its occasional uses e.g. its "fish" protocol (file access over SSH)
I don't like the idea of "grumpy prima donnas" telling open source authors/maintainers to remove functionality from their software just because it is "already covered" by someone else's (shit in their opinion, naturally) software
> Don't ask "why would you want that?" Don't say "oh we don't support that." Don't tell people "don't do it that way." FIX IT.
Absolutely - but GNOME does this ALL THE TIME. And so does Apple, and Microsoft. The reason I love KDE is BECAUSE I have the choice to do things how I want, because it is a 'powerful' desktop environment with lots and lots of configurable options for me.
You like vertical titlebars eh? Right-click on your existing titlebar -> Configure Window Manager -> Window Decorations -> Theme.. There is at least one theme that I think does what you want: "NoMansSky"
Article, there's an article?
It's kind of really just a "first post" though, right?
Personally I've been using KDE (on Debian Sid) for 20 years... I really can't fathom why anyone would prefer GNOME, but each to their own. Such is the beauty of FOSS...
KDE certainly went through a rough patch with version 4, where they had a stable, polished and powerful KDE3.5 and completely rehashed it, got rid of DCOP which was great, moved to something more compatible with Gnome, which sucked
I used Trinity for a while, while they fixed it, but fix it they did and I am very happy with the current iteration of Plasma Desktop
I'm one of those people who Liam moans about who thinks it's perfectly fine to have four different text editors and two kinds of version number (see, I did read Liam's post!) although i'm not sure what three Web browsers he is on about (unless he means Konqueror, Firefox and Chromium which is what I have on my menu, but is not a fair criticism since two of those are not part of KDE)
As a Debian user, I also see absolutely nothing wrong with offering ISO images for Stable, Testing, Unstable and Develop
> Chin up tiger! You've still got the El Reg commentariat, and if there's one thing guaranteed to turn that frown upside-down, it's... ah, no, actually. You're fucked.
Indeed! :-D
Maybe Heyrick would like to read my favourite fucking doomscroll probable fucking russian fucking propaganda site:
https://londonlovesbusiness.com/world-news/
Interesting thing about that "news" site is that its articles go back to just before brexit, June 24th sitting on page 3981 of 4304 pages of "business "news""..
I stopped taking it seriously a long time ago, but like the former TV channel RT, it does give a perspective on what Vlad Putin and his GRU wants us in the UK to think. Twatter and other "fucking news" outlets do too of course, but with more 'noise' so you can't tell what's propaganda and what isn't, whereas it's much easier to tell on LLB (and RT) because it pretty much all is
Tell that to the IDF..
By April, WHO had verified 906 attacks on healthcare in Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, and Lebanon.[5] As of June 2024, according to WHO, Israel has attacked 464 health care facilities, killed 727 health care workers, injured 933 health care workers, and damaged or destroyed 113 ambulances [6]
Not to mention the number of children's hospitals blown up by Mad Vlad
Not trying to minimise the ransom scum here obviously, but just pointing out the much larger scale scummery coming from Israel and Russia that everyone seems to want to forget about these days
Tbh i'd guess this latest cyber scummery is probably linked to the above, i.e. either coming from Russia in revenge for the UK's support for Ukraine, or from Iran in revenge for the UK's support for Israel
Have you never heard of "Rush Hour" ? The evening one comes right before the peak electricity usage due to cooking dinner and heating houses. And the morning one comes right after a lot of showers and kettles too.
And as soon as someone makes chargers "talk to eachother", someone will say something very mean and nasty to them and cause them to stop working.
>I can no longer read twitter without an account it seems
I never could read Twatter posts without an account, so I never bothered, until I discovered Nitter. Substitute x.xom for a Nitter instance such as xcancel.com
i.e. https://xcancel.com/_harshitroy/with_replies
+> Fairly easy to show that it's leaving your PC
Is it?
Wouldn't it be using the same encrypted channel as all the other "telemetry" that it sends?
And with a Copilot+ PC, it won't even need to send the raw data, it will just send a low-rank adaptation matrix which lossily and noisily encodes everything you have ever typed or displayed on your screen. It is literally the difference between you and the average user, encoded as a LoRA. Everything they need for both training and surveillance, but without the pesky legal issues.
Yes, how else do you suppose they got enough high quality data to train GPTs 1-4 ...
I also note that for "work/school accounts", " connected experiences" is mandatory, turned on via group policy (i guess probably on by default, and requires a friendly BOFH to turn it off)
It amazes me how "work/school" are assumed to be allowed to make deleterious privacy decisions on your behalf
Ok, it takes a lot of expensive energy, but that is nothing compared to the cost fungible value of land and equipment.
Yes, equipment depreciates value, but maybe the coke snorting gamblers-with-other-peoples-money are betting on China invading Taiwan next year, in which case the equipment will appreciate value..
They are probably also betting on repurposing the same equipment for mining whatever meme-coin comes next to serve as a currency in the fallout shelters after all our pound notes and dollar bills become worth less than sheets of bog roll..
> I guess I might pick Microsoft?
Not a chance.
Google: Maybe we should drop this whole "don't be evil" thing.. It's really holding us back. I think we should be full-on evil from now on..
Microsoft: Hold my beer...
They were Evil before it was cool. Now they realise that all the tech companies are going evil, and they know how to corner that market..
Given what is going on with Recall etc, this description applies to Windows itself, and indeed pretty much every modern piece of shite that comes out of Microsoft's corporate arse these days.
But even I am a little bit shocked at this, especially Microsoft's not-quite-denial that basically amounts to an admission to decrypting and stealing Firefox cookies (if you are using Edge, then they already have you by the bollocks, so no point stealing those..)
Cookie stealing is not something to be taken lightly. It doesn't just unmask you for surveillance, it could also let someone take control of any web account that you are logged in to. If Microsoft are passing this data on, e.g. via their government / law enforcement portal, then it could be seriously abused
